Софи Келли - Hooked On A Feline

I wasn’t sure about Marcus but I could. “Of course.”

“I’m sorry it’s such short notice. I have to go to Red Wing to assist on an emergency surgery on a police dog. Eddie’s gone to Minneapolis. His plan was to drive back early in the morning and go right to the rink.”

“It’s not a problem,” I said. “I love any chance I get to see Lucy and the other cats.”

I heard her exhale with relief. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

I wished her good luck with the surgery, we said good-bye and I put my phone back in my pocket.

The diner was quiet. Maybe because it was raining. There was a man standing in front of me at the counter in a dark blue slicker. It was Jonas Quinn, I realized. I touched his shoulder and he turned, smiling when he saw it was me.

“Kathleen, how are you?” he said.

“A little damp. Otherwise I’m fine. How are you?”

“I’m on my way to what I expect will be a very boring meeting. Otherwise I’m fine. And by the way, thanks for the help you gave Lachlan the other day.”

“It was no trouble,” I said. “He’s a great kid.”

Jonas’s smile got wider. “Yes, he is.”

His fingers were tapping out a rhythm on the edge of the counter and it struck me that he seemed to have the same musical bent as his nephew. Claire came out then with four take-out cups in a cardboard tray plus a paper take-out bag. She ran down the contents—three were coffees, each with a different permutation of cream and sugar, and the fourth container was tea.

“Would you like milk and sugar for the tea?” Claire asked.

“Just some milk, please,” Jonas said. “The tea is mine and I don’t like my drinks sweet.”

She smiled. “My grandfather says the same thing. He says, ‘I’m sweet enough already.’ ” She leaned sideways and looked at me. “Your food will be ready in just a minute, Kathleen,” she said.

Jonas picked up the tray of drinks and the take-out bag. “It was good to see you, Kathleen,” he said.

“You too,” I said. “I hope your meeting is short and interesting.”

He raised both eyebrows and smiled. “Me too.”

I was restless when I got home. Marcus hadn’t called, probably because he was working on one or both cases. I thought about what he’d said: “The problem is, no one had a reason to want Mike dead. . . . No one had a motive to kill Leitha, either. She was difficult, no question, but she was an annoyance . . . not a threat to anyone.”

I kept coming back to those Punnett squares Mike had drawn. Even though I’d told Hercules they didn’t matter, I couldn’t seem to let go of the idea that somehow they did. I thought about all the times I’d seen Mike working at the library, all the times he’d waved me over. I couldn’t think of a single time when he’d been drawing one of those squares.

I looked at the half sheet of yellow paper again. Something about it seemed wrong. I could think of only one occasion when I’d seen Mike with his head bent over a sheet of yellow paper. He’d mostly used wide-ruled white paper. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I’d seen. Jonas and Lachlan had come in to take Mike to lunch. I had taken them upstairs because Mike was in our workroom. As he looked up, I remembered him jamming several pages into a book and closing the cover. Several yellow sheets of paper. I’d thought he had been marking his place but now it struck me that maybe he had been hiding them instead. But from whom? From me? From Jonas and Lachlan? I didn’t know. Was I seeing something that hadn’t really happened?

I found a marker and pulled a flattened cardboard box out of the recycling bin. I spread the cardboard out on the table and drew out the Finnamore family tree starting with John Finnamore Senior. Below Finnamore Senior I added his two children, Leitha and John Junior. The next generation, Eloise Anderson-Hill, Elizabeth Bishop and Mary-Margaret Quinn followed. Underneath, I wrote in Mike, Jonas and his brother, Colin, along with Eloise’s daughters, Min and Nari. Lachlan had the last row to himself. I added spouses where I knew their names.

The diagram looked a little lopsided. Because there had been so many years between Leitha and her brother, Eloise was actually closer in age to Mike, Jonas and Colin—than she was to their mothers, her first cousins.

Plotting everyone’s eye color was just too complicated, so I decided to try doing hair texture instead. It was simpler.

Leitha Finnamore Anderson had had curly hair. I wrote CC beside her name. I remembered that Susan had included a photo of Leitha and her parents when she’d sent me the information about John Senior’s eye color. I got my laptop and looked at it again. Leitha’s father had had curly hair. CC went next to his name as well.

I studied the photo carefully. Leitha’s mother had had wavy hair I realized, not curly. It was a distinction some people had trouble making. That meant she had one curly-hair gene and one straight-hair gene. I put C s by her name. So Leitha could easily have been their child. Eloise had the same hair as her mother. Min and Nari were adopted, so they had no Finnamore DNA.

It wasn’t hard to find photos of Mike’s parents. They had the same curls their son did. I kept going mostly out of curiosity. Mary-Margaret Finnamore Quinn had wavy hair, not curly. Her son, Colin, had a head full of those Finnamore curls. And Jonas, who wasn’t a Finnamore, had wavy hair like their father. Ainsley Quinn, Colin’s wife, also had a gorgeous head full of blond curls.

I stared at my handiwork. I thought about Lachlan’s unruly hair. I pictured him with his head leaning in close to the microfilm reader. “A tangle of curls,” Mary had called his hair. But it wasn’t really curly, I realized.

Lachlan’s hair was wavy, which wasn’t possible.

I got the piece of paper that Owen had swiped and looked at it again. What if Mike had been trying to work out Lachlan’s eye color, not Leitha’s? I thought about Jonas coming into the library that day with Lachlan. It had been just a few days before the concert. What if I was right about why Mike had stuffed those pages in the book and closed it? I looked at Owen. “What if he was hiding them?” I said.

I had wondered why none of the staff had checked the pages of the book in which Keith had discovered Mike’s notes before Keith borrowed it. Mike had been around the library enough to know how things worked. He could have easily put the book with other ones Keith had requested. Whoever had checked Keith out could have missed those sheets of paper stuck inside the book, especially if it had been busy.

I took a sip of my coffee. There were only a couple of mouthfuls left now, and they were cold and a bit too sweet for me since some of the sugar had settled to the bottom of the cup even though Claire had stirred it well before she handed it to me.

I tapped the marker on the table. “Leitha was adamant about the importance of the family line,” I said, “and she thought telling the truth was more important than discretion or hurt feelings.” I remembered hearing her tell Mary the day that they had argued, with a great deal of pride in her voice, that the Finnamores could trace their family tree, unsullied, back to the Mayflower . Jonas had said that family was more than biology. Leitha had snorted and said of course he would say that.

I thought about my own family and the similarities between Ethan, Sarah and me, how Ethan made me think of Mom in so many ways. They were both born performers.

I thought about Lachlan’s wavy hair, his green eyes and his gentle manner so different from the more outgoing Finnamores, so much like soft-spoken Jonas.

“Lachlan is Jonas Quinn’s son,” I said. It was the only explanation that made sense.